Creating 3D art can be expensive. But thanks to creatives developing free open source software, like Blender, everyone can get involved. In this article, we've rounded up the best step-by-step Blender tutorials from around the web.

Improve your modelling, animating, rendering and compositing skills as you follow the projects and pick up tips from leading 3D designers in these video and text tutorials.

We've grouped these Blender tutorials into three sections, so that as well as browsing the whole list you can jump straight to the guides that are most relevant to you (use the drop-down menu above to navigate to the page you want).

Blender tutorials for beginners

Get started with the basics of Blender with this free video tutorial series from Blender Foundation-certified trainer Jonathan Williamson. Boasting around 13 hours of learning, the tutorials are broken down into sections.

Section one is all about learning to create and manipulate objects; section two looks at how to bring your new creations to life with movement; and section three covers how to render to share your creations and add finishing touches in the compositor.

Before you start creating anything in Blender, you need to master the basics. This 20-minute video tutorial will walk you through Blender's shading and lighting features, and shows you what you can do with them.

You don't need to master the entire 3D process to create impressive art in Blender, but it is at least helpful to have an understanding of the 3D production pipeline so you're aware of what the various elements are and can communicate with people who work in other parts of the pipeline. Get a helpful overview of this here.

Blender expert Andrew Price, aka Blender Guru, reveals the secrets of realistic texturing in Blender in this detailed video tutorial. In this tutorial, Price shows you how to take a texture and creating some variations of it, using Photoshop or a Photoshop alternative, then putting them into Blender. Price has a whole host of excellent Blender video tutorials on his YouTube page.

In this series of lessons, Blender artist Beorn Leonard explains all the fundamentals of character animation in Blender. Highlights include working with timing and spacing, overlapping motion, animation walk and run cycles and understand IK and FK.

Get to grips with the complete workflow for setting up lighting for an outdoor scene. In this tutorial you'll learn how to bake light for a blazing fast render, taking 14 seconds per frame rather than eight minutes.

Not all surfaces have the same reflective characteristics, and if you want your renders to look realistic then you'll need to ensure that they reflect light properly. In this tutorial from 3D World, Pietro Chiovaro talks through how best to create realistic reflections in Blender.

Lee Salvemini is kind of a big deal in the Blender community. He worked on Sintel, Elephants dream and spent two years on Star Wars video game titles for LucasArts. In this free video tutorial for Blender Guru, he presents a complete beginner's introduction to rigging. The video above is part one of the series, with parts two and three available on the Blender Guru site.

Blender comes bundled with an awesome feature called Camera Tracking. Camera Tracking is a process that involves using real footage and tracking its motion so that 3D elements and VFX can be added to it. This tutorial, again from the brilliant Blender Guru, gives you a complete beginners introduction to what this tool is and how to start using it right now.